Review: In Bruges

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Award-winning playwright (and Oscar-winner for his short, “Six Shooter”) Martin McDonagh makes an amusing writing-directing feature début with “In Bruges,” which finds Irish hitmen Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell) dispatched to historical Belgium—”Where the fook is Broozh?”—to cool their heels after a contract killing gone wrong. It’s the sort of cracked genre enterprise that’s always welcome, and with his characteristic verbal baroque, Sundance 2008’s opening-night film is stylish after a modest fashion, with attractive lighting by cinematographer Eigil Bryld (“The King,” “Wisconsin Death Trip,” “Becoming Jane”). McDonagh shines with actors, letting Gleeson and Farrell hold onto their own accents, and bringing out a sweetly damaged comic performance from Farrell, something like the hood he played in “Intermission” with just the right touch of Jerry Lewis’ inner pain. But his knack is words, dirty ones at that. He’s got a playwright’s love of the rhythmic potential of repetition and reiteration, particularly with a patois way past profane. Happening upon a film shoot, Ray exults, “They’re filming something, they’re filming midgets! My arse, let’s go, they’re filming midgets!” Later, meeting an actress from the film, Chloë (Clémence Poésy, playing girl-of-dreams as a serene tangle of genial twinkles), he’s given to gush, “I hope your midget doesn’t off himself, your dream sequence would be fucked.” (Farrell has a fine line in melting when late in the game she asks him, “Am I the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen in your stupid life?”) The film’s secret is that it’s a profane comedy about despair, which comes clear long before the third act appearing of Ralph Fiennes as their boss, playing a role like Ben Kingsley’s Don Logan in “Sexy Beast” with a pinch of Michael Caine. Oh, the look in his cold eyes when he demands across a table at an outdoor café, “You retract that about my cunt fucking kids!” Such a confabulation would have to climax in a literal side-street Boschian revel, which it does. Next time, perhaps McDonagh can toss aside the schematic screenwriting manuals and fuckin’ bloom. Carter Burwell’s emphatic score suggests certain unease about the film’s marketability. 107m. (Ray Pride)